Scenes of Capture in the City
This chapter discusses documentary approaches to subjects living in conditions of extreme marginalization. Though these subjects arguably suffer from social invisibility, becoming visible more often than not entails their capture in codes that lay beyond their control—such as the sensationalist narratives and stereotypes of the media or the incriminating gaze of institutions and representatives of the law. What are the possibilities and risks for documentary practices that, while aware of the dangers of the visible, insist on visualizing marginalized subjects? Focusing on Padilha’s Ônibus 174 (2002), Maria Augusta Ramos’ Justice (2004) and Behave! (2007), and Paulo Sacramento’s The Prisoner of the Iron Bars, Self-Portraits (2004), this chapter examines the strategies of films that locate their practice at sites where invisible subjects enter the purview of dominant society and reflect on cinema’s own forms of capture as well as on its possibilities for seeing otherwise.